Revealed: The playbook to take down ICE

Many of you tell me you feel powerless in the face of Trump’s reign of terror. You view and read horrific news reports about what ICE and Border Patrol are doing, but you don’t know how you can reduce or stop this horror.

Let me assure you: You’re not powerless. In fact, you have enormous power.

Start with ICE and Border Patrol detention facilities, now holding some 70,000 people in 224 facilities across the country that reportedly are rife with abuses. Last year, deaths in ICE custody reached a 20-year high. The first days of 2026 brought more deaths. Medical neglect, isolation, and overcrowding are routine.

CoreCivic (formerly Corrections Corporation of America) is the largest owner and operator of ICE and Border Patrol detention centers. It has a record of abusing detainees. Among the detention centers CoreCivic lists on its website is the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia. In December, The Intercept reported that there were at least 15 medical emergency calls to 911 from the Stewart facility every month since the start of the second Trump administration.

If you’re as outraged about this as I am, here are five things you can do now.

1. You and I are paying CoreCivic through our tax dollars. You can demand that our senators and representatives in Congress not fund the Department of Homeland Security until these abuses stop.

At this moment, congressional Democrats are trying to condition their votes for the Department of Homeland Security’s spending bill on placing guardrails around ICE and Border Patrol.

You might contact your senators and representatives and urge them not to vote for funding of the Department of Homeland Security. Or at the least, demand that in order to receive funding, their agents cannot wear masks, must wear identification, cannot use racial profiling, must have search warrants, cannot use lethal force, and must give arrestees due process, and that those detained must receive adequate medical care and accommodation.

You can reach your senators and representatives through the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

2. You may own CoreCivic indirectly. You can withdraw your savings from institutional investors that are financing it.

CoreCivic is a public-held corporation, meaning that it’s listed on the stock exchange. We may not own its shares directly, but many of us entrust our savings to institutional investors such as Black Rock and Vanguard, which own significant shares in CoreCivic.

Black Rock accounts for 16 percent of CoreCivic’s total shares. Vanguard Group holds 12 percent. They are CoreCivic’s largest shareholders. As such, they have the most influence (other than the federal government’s Department of Homeland Security, if DHS were acting responsibly) over how CoreCivic runs its detention facilities.

Find out if your savings are held by one or both of these two giant institutional investors. (Check with your broker or look at the reports they send you.) If they are, you might instruct your broker to withdraw your savings from them and put them in another institution that doesn’t hold shares of CoreCivic.

3. You may support the Democratic Party, specifically the Democratic Governors Association — which has been accepting donations from CoreCivic. You can contact the DGA and tell it to stop accepting such donations.

A Politico review of campaign finance records published Saturday shows that the Democratic Governors Association has taken in hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from CoreCivic. These are not charitable contributions by CoreCivic, but attempts by CoreCivic to influence state legislation.

From 2017 through at least 2025, the DGA took in $1,246,050 over 46 donations from CoreCivic. The most recent publicly reported donation to the DGA came in May 2025, according to records, around the same time White House officials began pressuring ICE to ramp up arrests.

The Republican Governors Association has undoubtedly taken in as much if not more donations from CoreCivic, but I’m assuming that more of us are affiliated with, or at least more influential in, the Democratic Party than the Republican.

You can contact the Democratic Governors Association and tell them to stop taking donations from CoreCivic. You can reach them by writing to the Democratic Governors Association, 1300 Eye Street NW, Suite 1200 West, Washington, D.C. 20005. Or telephone them at (202) 772-5600.

4. You can also express your outrage directly to CoreCivic — and tell them you refuse to support them with your tax dollars or your investment savings.

Write them directly at CoreCivic, 5501 Virginia Way, Suite 110, Brentwood, TN 37027. And phone them toll-free at 1-800-624-2931.

5. In addition to your power as a taxpayer, investor-saver, and voter, you’re also powerful as a consumer. Although you don’t purchase CoreCivic’s detention services directly, you buy from corporations that every day enable CoreCivic, ICE, and Border Patrol to do their nefarious work.

For example, ICE’s latest recruitment ads — built around music and language drawn straight from far-right neo-Nazi memes and aimed at extremists who are most fervent about guns, tactical gear, and vigilantism — are being distributed by and are profiting two companies you probably use all the time: YouTube and Google.

Meanwhile, AT&T, Home Depot, Amazon, and Microsoft are providing ICE and Border Patrol with cloud computing, surveillance software, and logistical support that’s central to how they function. This corporate collaboration makes large-scale enforcement possible.

And Verizon — through a 10-year, $176 million contract with the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE — supplies the communications infrastructure that facilitates raids, detention centers, and deportations.

Without these corporate partners, ICE could not carry out violent raids, operate sprawling detention centers, or deport people at scale. These corporations are enabling violence on the streets and death behind barbed wire.

Yet these corporations also spend billions of dollars each year on their brand images and public relations in order to attract your consumer dollars. None wants to be seen as underwriting civilian killings like those of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. None wants its brand associated with record numbers of deaths in custody. None wants to be linked to detention sites with names like “Alligator Alcatraz” that are rife with abuse.

Your consumer dollars are critical to these corporations. So, at the least, you can demand that they stop profiting from their collaborations with ICE. (Click on the word “demand” in the previous sentence to send them a message.)

And tell Verizon to end its contracts with ICE and stop profiting from violence, detention, and abuse.

You can go a step further and boycott the giant corporations now helping ICE. See here.

In these and many other ways, you are powerful. As a consumer, saver-investor, taxpayer, and voter, you keep these corporations going.

Together, we’re even more powerful. We need not tolerate their complicity in the inhumane acts now being done by ICE, Border Patrol, and Trump’s Department of Homeland Security.

You are not powerless. You can take action now. Please do.

• Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/. His new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org